Jules Feiffer's 1970 play The White House Murder Case, performed at the Orange
Tree Theatre, is full of wit and cynical wisdom, writes Laura Thompson.

There is no onstage clue as to when this play is meant to be set. Only the clunkingly outsize telephones, sitting on the desk of fictional US President Emmerson Hale, place The White House Murder Case in a recognisable recent past.

Otherwise this immaculate production by Christopher Morahan floats in an unspecified era, allowing the play to live as a surrealist satire, a timeless meditation upon war and power. Reminiscent of Mash and In The Loop, it also has its own singular strain of absurdism, as exemplified by an Agatha Christie-style murder in the Oval Office, in which the victim is pierced by a sawn-off golf club stapled to a placard reading “Make Love Not War”.

Author Jules Feiffer – a multi-talented man now in his eighties, who won a Pulitzer for his newspaper cartoons – wrote the play in 1970, as Vietnam was staggering toward its conclusion, but set it around 40 years in the future. This is therefore an apt moment for its UK premiere; although if this production had been staged a few years ago, at the height of the controversy over the Iraq war, then audiences would have been well-nigh convulsed at Feiffer’s prescience.

For The White House Murder Case is set during a conflict – with Brazil, as it happens – in which the State department must invent an acceptable public explanation for the loss of 750 US soldiers, killed by nerve gas intended for the enemy. The tiny Orange Tree stage is bisected, half of it serving as the presidential office and the other half a war zone in the Mato Grosso. Two combatants, played by James Alper and Joseph Balderrama, form an uneasy bond as they succumb to the effects of gas: their slow declines take on a blackly comedic aspect as bits of their anatomy (including the most obvious bit) fall away in their hands, accompanied by roars of their own laughter.

But the meat of the play – its wit and cynical wisdom – lies in the Oval Office. That marvellous actor Bruce Alexander gives a hilariously perturbing rendition of the president, torn between his beautiful bleeding heart liberal of a wife (sleek Samantha Coughlan) and his cabinet of brutal smiling pragmatists, all so good that it seems invidious to single out the elegant arch-machiavel Steven Crossley. Meanwhile Morahan directs in the self-effacing style that looks simple, and is in fact nothing of the kind.